August 2025

It is great to be having a bit of rain, the grass is greening up! Hopefully there'll be an autumn flush of grass which will be lovely for the cows. We will be doing a bit of grass seeding this month, to improve the quality and yield of our grassland for next year. We will be 'overseeding' our existing permanent pasture grassland with a white clover and perennial grass mixture. We are aiming to do 70 acres, which will make quite a difference for our cows next year. 

Last month, another vital service we need as a dairy farm has gone. It is the Artificial Insemination (AI) service that we rely on to get our cows in calf. A cow has a 21-day fertility cycle. When she is at the part of her cycle most likely to conceive, we would phone the AI service and an AI technician would come out to the farm to place the semen that we have bought just inside the cervix, with a high chance she would then conceive. However, this service, that has been present for decades, is no longer financially viable as there are fewer dairy farms requiring this service and it has been withdrawn. This means we're no longer able to serve our cows, a potential disaster as we need to get our cows in calf so that when they have their new calf, they start a new lactation, and of course, selling milk is what our business depends on! To overcome this problem in the short term, we have bought a Sussex Bull. He is serving the cows and hopefully getting them in calf. He's 3 years old, weighs around a tonne, is very gentle (though clumsy, he's already caused some damage to a building without realising it!) and most importantly, his name is Donald. The calves he sires will be beef calves, so he won't be providing us with dairy replacements to come into the dairy herd. We will still have to learn how to artificially serve our cows soon, so that we can continue to rear our own dairy heifers using a selected dairy bull's semen that we buy.